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It looks beautiful. Well, it looks barely adequate, probably, to a trained eye. But to me it looks beautiful, and makes me swell up with pride (except that one spot, that I really could have gotten a little straighter, that is destined to drive me bonkers for as long as I own the house).

Here's what I learned to do: use a crowbaruse a chiseluse a drill (with regular bit, drywall bit, and hole saw!)measure and cut drywallshiminstall drywallcaulk

I covet a shop vac. It was my wedding gift to Neighbor and 517, which I promptly borrowed, and I really love it. An incentive to get married, right there.

I had lots of help but I also did lots by myself. I learned a ton, and I gained a bunch of confidence. I was telling Mr. NBT last night that it seems a little bit like childbirth -- now that it's over, I forget how painful and miserable it was while I was doing it, how it broke my spirit. Now I'm interested in pulling up the linoleum to see what's under there. And of course I still need to sand down the walls and paint the bathroom, but now I'm interested in tackling the trim, too, because it's going to seem so shabby compared to the rest of the place. I can see how you can get going and never stop.

Today I am spending the day as my alter ego, Susie Homeowner. Susie is all the things I'm not: patient, handy, confident with tools, and genuinely interested in construction. She and I spent several hours yesterday removing the tile from around my shower. We wore a facemask but still inhaled a fair volume of unpleasant dust and yuck. We're halfway done. Today we'll finish the destruction and head to Home Depot to equip ourselves for a rebuild.

Unfortunately I left my digital camera at work, or you'd be treated to a dramatic set of photos. Right now my tub is full of tiles and sheetrock pieces and debris, and the walls are scarred and strange looking up to about eye level. I've got the music on loud and have had one cup of coffee, I've been running and I feel strong and energetic. And although I don't know what I'm doing, Susie Homemaker is reassuring and confident, and we're going to have us a new shower before the day is done. If we're really ambitious and on task, we might also paint the walls (she's rejected Dried Hydrangea, and is torn between Canvas Cloth and Sandman as the color choice).

UPDATE 1: Susie Homemaker is not as good with the hammer as she would like to think. She keeps pounding me on the knuckle. It is making relations a bit rocky.

UPDATE 2: We're 3/4 done with demolition. Susie is a bit careless about dropping tiles onto my feet. Also, should I be bleeding this much?

This dog toy is the favorite of both Haole and Lila. They treat it very differently, though. Haole likes to carry it around gently in his mouth, place it somewhere, and lie nearby. Lila leaps around until she locates it, and then chews at it until it emits its very distinctive low-toned flatulent squeak, and then walks around delightedly, making strange noises. Haole looks uncomfortable and put out when she does this.

In any case, dogs seem to agree that the devil ball is lots of fun. I went to Neighbor and 517's house to water their plants and Lila wiggled from foot to foot until I let her in, and then she went romping around from room to room until she found the devil ball. I think she hid it somewhere.

There's a lot I've been wanting to write about. For now, here's the deal. The car needs a new transmission. That's about $4000 if I get a new one, about $3800 if I get a used one. I asked my mechanic what he'd tell his sister. He said, well, I have a couple of questions. Have you had your timing belt done? I said, I think so, check your records. He found a timing belt gasket (all technical terms are approximate, and probably wrong) but they haven't done the belt. I vaguely remember someone changing my timing belt, so it's possible I took it to the dealer for that. But it's unlikely -- I try to avoid them. Anyway, he said, that'll be another $700 or $800 if you need that. And how about front end work? There are a lot of ball joints on this car, and it doesn't like we've done anything with those.

Okay. Weren't we just here? In hindsight, I did the wrong thing with my Honda. I should have taken the insurance money and just gotten all the body work done on it, with a little of my own money out of pocket. Instead I spent a lot more out of pocket to get a newer car (although still a used car). And of course I got a ridiculous car, a finicky and expensive Passat, just because I love how it looks and feels. It was such a dumb decision, although, to be fair to myself, I hadn't yet left my reasonably lucrative job. Anyway, I bought a car that is extremely expensive to repair and maintain, and I stupidly fell helplesslyin love with it.

And now I have a repair that doesn't make sense to make. I said to the mechanic, I bet you'd tell your sister to take that money and buy a Honda, wouldn't you? He said, "How'd you guess?" He sounded genuinely surprised. I don't have a pile of extra cash to throw down on a new vehicle. I'm thinking I am in the market for about a $5000 car. I can spend something like that to get my current car back working (I'd go with the used transmission, but reserve some for the ball joints and timing belt, if indeed the dealer hasn't replaced it). Note that my current car is a 2000 Passat sedan with 95,000 miles. It's not book value because the body has a spot from a day when someone was parked in my driveway and tried to squeeze around them into the garage and got it wrong. So there's a dent over the wheel well and a little rust. In other words, this isn't a pristine car. And, of course, it has no transmission.

Bleh. I still need to buy a mast. That's much more interesting than this. And, unfortunately, suddenly much less pressing.

We've borrowed a mast from my dad, who's not using his boat this year, and stepped it. We've run most of the rigging, although a few things have us scratching our heads. Tonight before the race we'll tune the rig and try the main halyard for the first time.

The Mast Fund has been an unexpected success. 23 of you have contributed, and the total is $1964.68. (Typepad/Paypal appear to take an 8% cut, which makes those numbers look a little wonky. I think what you guys actually pledged comes out to $2010.) There was one anonymous donation that was exceptionally generous, and I actually got nervous and tearful when I saw it, and tried to figure out how to give it back. To you, I say, wow. I wish you could see my face. I wish I knew who you are, except partly I love not knowing. It feels a little bit like magic, this way. And to all of you, I say, thank you. I can sit here quivery and get all teary at this sense of support from so many people I've not yet met. It's a powerful kind of gratitude you've inspired in me. I don't have the vocabulary to write about it, really, which is why I've been speechless about it for a few days.

And my cup runneth over, because amazingly, the insurance company is going to send us a check for the mast, less our $250 deductible. So we can replace the mast, and if we are lucky enough to find a used mast that could work, we might have money left over to make a bunch of other necessary repairs. Ruby and I sat on the boat last night in the gathering darkness, running lines and halyards and making a list of all the things we should repair/replace.

If it's okay with those of you who donated, I'd like to use those funds for boat and house repairs, if insurance money fully covers the mast. If that's not okay, please let me know -- I can give the money back. I don't want anyone to think that I solicited money for false pretenses or anything like that.

The other day I was powerwashing the bottom of a boat that I'd helped haul out. I loved powerwashing -- what a satisfying activity it is, holding this Ghostbusters-like nozzle and shooting this jetstream of water that scrapes away all the growth and goop on the bottom of a boat. It's immediate and obvious and clear the impact of what you're doing, like vacuuming a very hairy rug and making a clean line there.

But as I washed I thought about how my sense of overwhelm and helplessness doesn't apply to boats. There's plenty about boats that I don't know, plenty that I haven't done, but it doesn't scare me the way house and yard stuff does. And it interests me -- I WANT to learn and try the things I don't know how to do. I can sand and varnish, do fiberglass and rigging work, repair a torn sail and dive on the bottom of a boat and clean it. I can fiddle with an outboard motor and operate a crane and drive a trailer. I can jury-rig a broken boom vang and powerwash a boat and use a grinder. I can splice and rivet and swage. And the stuff I don't know how to do, I know who to ask and how to get help and I'm not afraid of it.

I want to get that same sense of undauntedness -- courage and curiousity and confidence -- about my house and yard and car.

My new cell phone has text message "templates." Presumably these are the most frequently used messages that everyone needs, and to save time they're pre-programmed into the phone. The templates built into my phone are the following:

I am late. I will be there at

I'm in a meeting, call me later at

I'm busy right now. I'll call you later.

I will be arriving at

Meeting is cancelled.

See you at

See you in

Please call

I love you too

Happy birthday

Thank you

Most of these seem reasonable, if a little bit formally worded. But what struck me was the "I love you too." The "too" is interesting. "I love you" is not a template. The company decided that wasn't what its customers would be typing and want a short cut for. They decided that its customers would be receiving "I love you" texts quite often, and would need to quickly respond. I wonder what the embedded assumptions are about that. I would have liked to be a fly on the wall during the corporate meeting where the template messages were decided on.

The overworked guy at the cell phone store on Friday recommended that I not buy a new phone at the store. "It's cheaper if we send it to you. You'll get it Wednesday." Hmmm. How much cheaper? I thought I needed a phone for the interim period. He dug around under the counter where he had a supply of used phones and found one that seemed to work. He popped my SIM chip in (whatever that is), fired up the thing, and said, "Ta da. You can borrow this phone."

My SIM chip apparently has my phone number in it, so any phone with that chip in it will show up on people's caller ID as me. And it had a few stored text messages of mine in it. No phone numbers. The cell phone store guy thought he was being triumphant as he read me addresses in the phone: Alex, Amanda, Amatos? These are yours, right? No, they weren't. So he deleted all the phone numbers and gave me the phone, wiped clean.

Except it wasn't, quite. As I fumbled around trying to work out how to use it, I discovered a mailbox full of text messages. Some were mine, from my friends, to me, and from those I could recover a handful of phone numbers. But there were about a hundred text messages that had come in to the phone's former owner. I read a lot of them, feeling like a voyeur.

Sometimes I couldn't tell if a message was from my friends, to me, or from a stranger to a stranger. ( "What u doing?" and "On my way"). But I deduced the phone's former owner was a guy. There was a whole series of messages from one number that I think was a girl, who I think the phone owner got lucky with after some courtship in a bar. (Also, potentially, a jilted or jealous ex girlfriend sent an angry text or two, very late at night, after he apparently didn't say goodbye to her....) He owns a big truck. He rides something, maybe mountain bikes, and likes to go to the beach. He smokes pot, and arranges to buy it via text messages. (The seller wanted to give him a deal, man, but lost some of their crop....Bummer.) I wondered what prompted this message: "Ur a ballbag." Someone texted that they were going to give notice at work the next day unless they got some support from management, and asked that he keep it a secret. Your secret is safe with me.

Would somebody please invent a waterproof cellphone? If such a thing has been invented, will somebody please sell it to me (inexpensively, please!)?

Also, would somebody please invent a means whereby the contents of one's address book are automatically backed up to a satellite memory someplace, so that when a phone gets dunked all the numbers and names aren't gone forever?

If I know you in real life, and you think I have your number, I don't anymore. Please email or call me, and leave me your contact info.

I generally use Gmail's internal chat program, because I like the archiving function, and, primarily, because I'm lazy and it has everyone I can chat with right there in the address book, and I don't need to open another window. Before that I used AOL instant messenger, and occasionally Yahoo's instant messenger. I don't chat all that often, and really chose my client based on who I needed to talk with and what they were using.

But today a friend offered to help me fix my pesky photo thumbnail problem. We were chatting via Gmail and he ran me through some diagnostics and we got nowhere. I said, I wish I could send you a screen shot, and he said, if you have Hello you can. I'd played with Hello before and thought it was cool but perhaps a novelty. But now I get it, just how useful it is. You can send your screen back and forth to people as well as looking at pictures together. You can see what they're looking at while you're chatting. It's a totally different tool, and a much better one, than a basic chat.